Using Recall and Elimination Terms in Separate Runs for High Volume Document Sorting

Harvey Hyman, Terry Sincich, Rick Will, and Warren Fridy III

Abstract—This paper reports on a study undertaken to explore the problem of volume in searching large scale digital collections. An experiment is conducted using elimination terms as a method to reduce the number of non-relevant documents in the information retrieval (IR) result. The goal is to provide insight into how elimination terms can be used as a sorting method to reduce volume. The results of the experiment demonstrate that modifying the search structure with an elimination term component can significantly reduce the number of non-relevant documents in the retrieval set to address the problem of high volume in electronic document sorting and searching tasks.